Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change: Insights from the Global North and South

This volume provides a systematic comparative treatment of urban contact dialects in the Global North and South, examining the emergence and development of these dialects in major cities in sub-Saharan Africa and North-Western Europe.

The book’s focus on contemporary urban settings sheds light on the new language practices and mixed ways of speaking resulting from large-scale migration and the intense contact that occurs between new and existing languages and dialects in these contexts. In comparing these new patterns of language variation and change between cities in both Africa and Europe, the volume affords us a unique opportunity to examine commonalities in linguistic phenomena as well as sociolinguistic differences in societally multilingual settings and settings dominated by a strong monolingual habitus.

These comparisons are reinforced by a consistent chapter structure, with each chapter presenting the linguistic and social context of the region, information on available data (including corpora), sociolinguistic and structural findings, a discussion of the status of the urban contact dialect, and its stability over time. The discussion in the book is further enriched by short commentaries from researchers contributing different theoretical and geographical perspectives.

Taken as a whole, the book offers new insights into migration-based linguistic diversity and patterns of language variation and change, making this ideal reading for students and scholars in general linguistics and language structure, sociolinguistics, creole studies, diachronic linguistics, language acquisition, anthropological linguistics, language education and discourse analysis.

Paul Kerswill is Emeritus Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of York, UK. His research focuses particularly on dialect and language contact resulting from migration. With Jenny Cheshire, Sue Fox and Eivind Torgersen, he has published “Contact, the Feature Pool and the Speech Community: The emergence of Multicultural London English” (Journal of Sociolinguistics).

Heike Wiese is Professor of German in Multilingual Contexts and founder of the Centre “Language in Urban Diversity” at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Her 2012 monograph on Kiezdeutsch as a new German dialect received national and international media attention, and raised awareness of urban contact dialects as a legitimate part of the linguistic landscape.